Mystery Villa Read Online Free PDF Page A

cover.
    At the corner where Windsor Crescent meets Osborne Terrace, Wild paused and wiped a perspiring forehead.
    â€˜Little devils; too quick for me,’ he confessed.
    â€˜Like quicksilver, they are,’ agreed Bobby; ‘here one second and gone the next.’
    â€˜Anyway, I can run a bit still, if they hadn’t had such a start,’ observed Wild, with a touch of satisfaction. ‘I didn’t notice you got ahead of me much, though you can give me years and weight.’
    â€˜Took me all my time to keep up with you,’ confessed Bobby, little disposed to lament, however, that now he would not be called upon to appear in court to sustain a charge of football playing in the street before a sarcastic magistrate, probably secretly sympathetic with the culprits, and inclined to regard the police as officious spoil-sports. ‘It was their start did it,’ he agreed gravely.
    â€˜That’s right; a good start they had,’ Wild repeated. ‘Didn’t I hear broken glass?’
    â€˜At Tudor Lodge, I think it was,’ Bobby answered.
    They walked back towards it, escaped, as soon as they could, two or three housewives anxious to tell their stories of disturbed rests, wakened babies, trampled gardens; promised that ‘steps would be taken’ – a satisfying phrase – and then turned into Tudor Lodge, through that gap at the side of the padlocked gate by which, apparently, entrance was effected generally.
    To Bobby it seemed that there strengthened, as they approached the house, the general air of dreariness and neglect that brooded upon it. Hard, indeed, to imagine such desolation giving shelter to any living creature. The rotting woodwork, the discoloured bricks, the gravel drive so overgrown with weed and grass it could hardly be distinguished from the stretch of garden – now a tangled wilderness of shrubs and trees and grass and rubbish – that it skirted, all served to heighten that impression. The windows, closed inside by wooden shutters, were broken in one or two places, and covered everywhere with the grime and dirt of years. A huge spider’s web spun across the front door proved no one recently had opened it, and no sign of life showed anywhere. Only Bobby remarked, as they turned by the side of the house in search of the damage done by the erring football, that the small window above he had noticed open the time before was now closed.
    â€˜What’s the landlord thinking about, anyhow?’ Bobby asked.
    â€˜No one seems to know who the place belongs to,’ Wild answered. ‘Someone told me once it was a freehold belonging to the old party herself, but I don’t think that’s right. Mr Howard, that’s the rate collector, told me they couldn’t find out, and had given up trying to get any rates paid – they didn’t know who to summons, and the summonses they’ve issued no one’s ever taken notice of. You can bang the door as long as you like, but there’s never any answer.’
    They came to a standstill by the window through which the football had smashed. It was that of the scullery, apparently, and it seemed that no inmate of the house, if indeed inmate there were, had taken any notice of the crash. Bobby climbed on the sill of the window, and peered within. It was an interior matching the desolation that reigned without. Ceiling, walls, furniture, everything, all thick with the accumulated dust of many years, and the door of the room sagging upon one hinge, as if in the decrepitude of extreme old age. He shouted once or twice, but got no answer. He could not see the football itself, and supposed it had rolled into a corner. He got down to the ground again, and said:
    â€˜I don’t think there can be anyone there.’
    â€˜Oh, the old party’s never out in the day; only she’ll never show,’ Wild answered, and strolled on to where a rotting fence and some tumbledown